As Trump closed in on VP pick, Kari Lake's name vanished. Here's why

On the day former President Donald Trump won the New Hampshire primary, effectively scuttling Nikki Haley’s effort to oust him as the Republican nominee this year, one of Trump’s most visible surrogates made news of her own.

U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake answered questions about the publication that day of a recorded conversation between her and Jeff DeWit, who then headed the Arizona Republican Party.

DeWit cited “very powerful people who want to keep you out” of running for office in 2024 and asked her to name her price for that. The conversation happened in March 2023, 10 months before London’s Daily Mail published the recording.

It created a firestorm in the presidential swing state of Arizona and led DeWit to resign his post the next day.

It also seemed to break an unwritten rule involving Trump: Don’t upstage him.

Trump is set to name his running mate any day, and one name that seemed to drop out of consideration long ago is Lake’s, even though her Senate campaign has kept her name linked to his in signs that herald a “Trump Lake” ticket intended to “Make Arizona Great Again!”

Why did Trump turn away from Kari Lake in his veepstakes?

George C. Edwards III, a presidential scholar and retired political science professor at Texas A&M University, said eliminating Lake was no surprise.

“She’s had no government experience at all,” Edwards said. “She would become an issue. It would be a Sarah Palin-type of thing, except worse."

Former Alaska Gov. “Sarah Palin was at least for a short period a governor of a state. Kari Lake has been nothing. She’s never had any responsibilities for governing anybody. What has she been? She’s been a media personality and an election denier.”

Joel K. Goldstein, a retired constitutional law professor at Saint Louis University who has written two books on the vice presidency, agreed.

“She never struck me as a viable possibility. If you look at all of the people who have been selected as major-party running mates over the past 80-plus years … all of them have been people who had previously had at least some service as senator, governor, House of Representatives or major federal executive position. She hadn’t done any of that. She just struck me as a totally implausible selection to begin with.”

Goldstein said Lake’s prospective government resume as a vice-presidential nominee might be the barest since Republican Alf Landon named newspaper publisher Frank Knox.

President Franklin Roosevelt won a second term in a landslide over Landon and Knox. Knox at least had military experience, and later served as Roosevelt’s secretary of the Navy.

Lake: Focused on her US Senate run

For its part, Lake’s Senate campaign sidestepped the former speculation about her future and maintained she is focused on her effort to succeed retiring U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.

“President Trump endorsed Kari Lake for Senate back in October 2023. She is running for Senate and supports President Trump and his agenda,” the campaign said in a statement. “Kari has full confidence President Trump will select a strong Vice President, defeat (President) Joe Biden, and she looks forward to joining the Senate to fight for Arizona.”

While Lake might pass a loyalty test for Trump, her strict adherence to Trump dogma means she doesn’t speak to another voter constituency, Edwards said, and her 2022 gubernatorial loss suggests she might not even be able to deliver her home state.

“She’s more visible than 99.9% of Trump supporters because she’s a prominent politician in an important state,” he said. “That could help propel her into the conversation, but I think it was a short conversation.”

Goldstein said the geographic allure of someone from a swing state like Arizona is overblown and rare anyway. Historically, vice presidential nominees are viewed as entrees to a wider coalition of support, he said.

Wyoming’s Dick Cheney and Delaware’s Joe Biden helped offset the lack of foreign policy experience for Gov. George W. Bush in 2000 and for U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in 2008.

Jack Kemp, the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President George H.W. Bush, brought a measure of moderation to U.S. Sen. Bob Dole’s ticket in 1996, not to raise hopes of carrying New York, Goldstein said.

Was Lake a serious contender for Trump's VP nomination?

In Trump’s case, the vice presidential vetting process and his own thinking has been opaque.

It’s not clear, for example, how seriously Trump ever considered Lake.

On the night Trump won the Iowa caucus, seven days before winning New Hampshire, Trump singled out Lake, who is an Iowa native who campaigned for him in the state.

He praised her as “terrific” and predicted, “She’ll be a senator — a great senator.” Even then, pundits translated his words this way: He’s not picking Lake.

While national media seized on Trump’s statement, it only reaffirmed what he said in a video message on the October night she formally entered the Senate race. He endorsed her then, effectively signaling that was where he wanted her.

One thing that is clear is how different Lake is from the alleged finalists: North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Tim Scott of South Carolina, and J.D. Vance of Ohio.

Those people all hold public office. To put it another way, they won an election; the former Phoenix newscaster lost her 2022 gubernatorial bid.

After that, Lake drifted through a limbo in which she sued to be governor while running for the U.S. Senate and was rumored to be in the mix for the vice presidential nomination.

Trump discussed some of his thoughts on his veep possibilities in an interview Wednesday with Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade.

“We have some great people that we’re looking at. We’re, as they say, a deep bench,” Trump said. “I think I’m pretty well set in my own mind, but you know you’ve got some good people and I have changed a little bit, but they’re all great.”

He described Rubio as “certainly one of the people that we’re looking at.” Trump said he liked Vance’s beard and said Burgum’s record restricting abortion rights in North Dakota is “a little bit of an issue.”

Trump declined to discuss whether others should be included in the speculation and said he would like to make his choice known during next week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Lake’s voting history may have been a political liability.

She moved from being a registered Republican to an independent to becoming a Democrat during Obama’s rise to the White House. She returned to the GOP in 2012.

Through it all, Lake, who describes herself as “Trump in heels,” was a regular presence at his Mar-a-Lago resort, so much so that the Washington Post reported that Trump wanted her out.

In June, Trump held a town hall in Phoenix in his first visit to Arizona since 2022. For those familiar with Trump’s rallies, he notably didn’t call Lake on stage with him.

He briefly praised Lake and urged his supporters to elect her to the Senate. He gave a similar passing mention to congressional candidate Abe Hamadeh.

Trump’s June visit came after he abruptly canceled a visit to Arizona scheduled just days after the Lake-DeWit story went public. He also canceled another visit in the spring.

There are other signs that Lake’s national political stock simply wasn’t rising.

Data tracked by Google shows the greatest search interest in Lake over the past year was when the DeWit recording published and largely flat-lined before and after that incident.

Amazon’s book-sales data shows Lake’s 2023 “Unafraid: Just Getting Started” currently ranks No. 280 in political commentary.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: As Donald Trump closed in on VP pick, Kari Lake's name vanished